Gadgetory

guys bullseye here and today we're gonna be taking a look at another GT x 1080 PCB this time the gigabyte extreme water force card this also shares its PCB with the extreme gaming which is the air-cooled version of this same card if you would like to see the rueful review over the card you can find a link to that in the description down below and with that out of the way let's get to actually taking a look at this PCB first things first we have the core voltage vrm right here and that provides power to the GPU core down here we have the 1 volt PLL voltage this is a extra voltage that is required to make the GPU core work but it's not really an important vrm it's very low-power it doesn't have any impact on overclocking and it you know isn't impacted you know by overclocking in any in any way either and so it doesn't really matter and you know we're not gonna actually cover that one in detail over here we have the memory vrm that provides power to the gddr5 X chips surrounding the GPU core and in this area somewhere there is the 1.8 volt rail which also goes to the gddr5 X chips and basically it's again a low-power vrm and it's basically just necessary for the gddr5 X chips to work they take the bulk of their power from this VR I'm over there so with all of the v arms identified let's actually take a closer look at what they're made up of first of all the core voltage is a 12 phase VRM we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 inductors or chokes whichever you prefer to call them and each of these has its own dr. Moss power module so each of these has you know a power module unfortunately the thermal pads cover some of them but you know if those weren't there you could see that there's actually 12 of these so this is a real real 12 phase design these dr. Moss power modules these are FDM f68 23 seized from Fairchild Semiconductor these are rated to do 50 amps at 300 kilohertz or 45 amps at 1 megahertz so you know they're plenty powerful and with you know this 12 phase vrm and one of these per phase you get around 540 to 600 amps of current capability through this vrm here obviously if you've watched my previous a previous PCB breakdowns you would know that the that getting a face count above eight phases requires some extra extra circuitry and this being a 12 phase it needs to use doublers or at least doublers or quadruple errs to actually achieve the 12 phase twelve phases so this is done by these three ICS on the PCB these are u P 1911 ours each of them takes in a pwm signal from the u p9 v 11 located over here so this is the V RM control chip so that monitors the vrm output voltage power draw and everything for this here v RM and it feeds each of these 1911 or piet 1911 our chips a PWM signal and also monitors the current readings that are coming out of those and those then take that PWM signal and feed it into four four of the four of the dr. most modules located in the the RM itself now these chips do have a downside they cut your switching frequency to 1/4 of what you're feeding them so essentially it means that you have less accurate control over each of the phases however gigabyte can actually get around this you know downside of using these chips by using a really high switching frequency from the 9 95 11 and the 95 11 can provide up to 2 megahertz switching frequency so you know that's basically 2 million updates for you know you know most fad like phase updates per second and basically when though that goes to the or drew blur that means each phase can be updated as many as five hundred thousand times a second so it can adjust the current through that phase that many times each second that means that as long as gigabyte uses a reasonable switching frequency on the you know the you p95 11 the erm actually runs you know actually relatively clean power on par with basically any other GT X 1080 because 200 to 500 kilohertz switching frequency is the usual vrm switching frequency that you'll see on most graphics cards and really going above that is generally completely unnecessary unless you're doing extreme overclocking or something like that and even in those cases it often doesn't really help anything because most V RMS can get away with can actually do very very clean power at you know 200 or 500 kilohertz already so really running super high frequencies isn't a requirement so the fact that gigabytes using these quadruple errs isn't isn't a major downside however it is still interesting that they use quadruple errs and I'm pretty sure that you know and this the reason for that is that quadruple errs are relatively expensive and they don't like it doesn't really make sense to use them in many situations like this where you could have just used six PWM signals from the from the control chip and then use doublers to actually get your twelve phases however I do believe gigabyte opposite for the quadruple errs because this card has display outputs all the way over here as well as over here and the way these guys work is that there's the these switches over here so you have display so normally your display signal goes to the back of the card but if you would like to the card will put the signal to the towards the back and then this switch will actually send it around to the other end of the card and this is for VR so that you can hook up a VR output to the front panel of your you know of your tower and basically by doing this there's a lot of extra traces that have to go through the PCB and that means there's a lot less available space to route traces for the 12 phase vrm which would normally require a pretty significant amount of phases traces coming off of the control chip located right there so gigabyte obviously seems to have opposite for the quadruple errs to minimize the amount of traces coming directly off of the off of the up9 95 11 and tried to spread them out between the quadrupolar chips around the card so overall the core voltage vrm is perfectly fine ridiculously overkill for a GTX 1080 as I said before something around you know between 540 and 600 amps depending on how switching frequency you go by opted to feed into the quadruple errs and the reason for this partially is because this vrm in this in the water force card there is no air flow in this area because there's no fan and there's actually no airflow anywhere on the PCB of the card so all of the cooling of the card is has to be taken care of by just you know a passive airflow from your case fans or from the fact that hot air rises and everything and then the the bulk of the heat of the card is then taken care of by an a i/o cooler sitting over the GPU core right here and that a i/o cooler has a copper plate that covers all the gddr5 X chips so those are well cooled and then there's a heat pipe coming off of an aluminum block that you know is in contact with the core voltage v RM right and that then pipes heat into the copper copper plate that the AIO cooler uses to actually also cool the gddr5 X chips so that's how gigabyte basically cools the vrm but because this isn't a particularly efficient way to cool of erm it does mean that they've probably you know did this ridiculous amount of over spec on the v RM partially to compensate for the fact that the vrm temperatures are going to be less than you know less than optimal they're really gonna be quite up there because that one heat pipe having to take all of this heat is through an aluminum block and through several like the thing is like when you're bonding heat sinks together you know you have aluminum block solder copper heat pipe solder copper copper cold plate for the water block and that's just a lot of different materials for the heat to transition through and that really impedes heat transfer performance and that means this vrm even with the heat pipe will be running pretty pretty toasty so the ridiculous overkill rating here that's at 25 degrees ambient which is basically assuming that the MOSFETs are you know capable of being cooled by the hot air rises air flow whereas here in a case the card will most likely be upside down so that's really not going to work that great so the aluminum block is there to you know make sure that the ERM get gets at least some active cooling but even then it's it's less than optimal so I think this ridiculous car like current capability is just basically compensating for the fact that the vrm is gonna run really really halt because there's really no reason why you would need this on a GTX 1080 it won't really help overclocking performance because the card will never ever need this much current but it is you know nice that this vrm is so ridiculously over built because you basically have peace of mind that there is no way you're ever going to have this fail on you assuming that there isn't some manufacturing defect in it so props to gigabyte on the core voltage vrm so let's move over to the other major vrm on this card and that's the memory voltage VR M right here so that feeds the gddr5 X chips this is a two-phase vrm we have - chokes here it's controlled by the U P 1665 this is a two phase voltage controller with integrated drivers so basically there's no driver ICS anywhere you know around this area because this can actually drive the MOSFETs directly and speaking of the MOSFETs these are fairchild power trench power stages so these are not regular MOSFETs these are a high side fat and a low side FET integrated into one IC so each of these is actually enough to make up and so you know a single phase and there's two of them in each phase because gigabyte wanted even more current capability so they put two of them in parallel to get more current throughput the end result of this is that each of these has a 13 amp high side and that's a continuous rating so obviously in AVR and you can expect it to do quite a bit more than that and that's a 25 degree ambient rating so you know the passively cooled no heatsink no air and no proper airflow other than other than just convection so that you know that rating is most relevant here because there is no active airflow over this this part of the vrm and it's gonna be running pretty halt just because of that so I'm gonna go with that rating but still the continuous rating is still very very conservative because the high side MOSFET is basically we can turn on and off hundreds of thousands of times a second it doesn't stay on continuously so you can actually expect it to do quite a bit more than the 13 amps continuous rating even in this terribly cold scenario that it's in the high the low side FET is 23 amps continuous and that rating is actually realistically what it will actually be able to handle in this application because the low-side fat is turned on for most most of the time when in a drm so that one test spends a lot of its time turned on so you know we have 13 amps well not even 13 so let's say you know 15 or 16 amps / / I see in each phase so that gives us about 30 amps / for each given phase two phases total you have 60 amps you know if you don't go by the absolute worst-case scenario and if you go by worst case possible scenario then it's 52 amps because that's the high side MOSFETs continuous rating for no proper cooling scenarios and this is again ridiculously overkill the gddr5 X on a 1080 poles around 30 watts which with the voltage it runs that works out to around 22 amps so you know we have a we have a 52 M a memory vrm here so gigabyte went ridiculously overkill and i suspect it's again because there's no proper air flow in this area due to the lack of the fan so yeah does mean that if you actually tried to get some airflow into the shroud of the card this the RM is just going to be amazing like it perform amazingly and in its stock configuration it's also perfectly good because gigabyte really did go insanely overkill on everything just to make sure that it can function in the less than optimal cooling environment that they've decided to go with on the water force whereas the gaming extreme the all know the extreme gaming so that's the air-cooled version of this card that one would actually have a heatsink here with proper airflow over the entire of erm section so that one would actually arguably probably be a you know I have better erm capabilities not that it really matters because this isn't gtx 1080 and even in these less than sub you know in these completely sub optimal cooling scenarios the VR i'm set up that gigabyte has opted for he's so ridiculously overkill that it really doesn't matter they're like you're not gonna see a GTX 1080 use anywhere near the whole capacity of this vrm I'll be surprised like not even 50% of the capacity of this vrm will ever really be used so yeah they're very nice very nice PCB from gigabyte here and props to them for designing such a ridiculous monstrosity if you think about it so that's that for the PCB breakdown like the video if you liked it subscribe to the channel if you haven't subscribed yet and do consider you know donating to gamers Texas on patreon so we can keep bringing you more content in the future thank you for watching and see you next time